paradise is nowhere
by black.k.kat
Summary: The battle is over, humanity has won, and they've both managed to survive. It's a meeting somewhere between love and hate, animosity and devotion, with too many years and too much pain between them. But there have been bigger miracles in the course of this war, and maybe, when everything else is gone, hope can still remain.


**Rating: **PG-13(ish)

**Warnings: **Angst, canon character death, lots and lots of authorial wishful thinking.

**Word Count: **~1900 (complete)

**Pairings: **Kakashi/Obito

**Summary: **The battle is over, humanity has won, and they've both managed to survive. It's a meeting somewhere between love and hate, animosity and devotion, with too many years and too much pain between them. But there have been bigger miracles in the course of this war, and maybe, when everything else is gone, hope can still remain.

**Disclaimer: **I don't hold the copyrights, I didn't create them, and I make no profit from this.

**Author's Notes: **Because I have been thinking about all the possible ways Kishimoto can finish Obito's story and am FRUSTRATEDwith the conclusion that it can only end in tragedy. Therefore, this is my wishful thinking.

Also, the absolute most amazing KakaObi fic in existence is here: archiveofourown(dotorg) /works/ 564925 . I've recced it before, but it can _never_ get enough love. Makes me cry tears of joy every time I read it, no joke.

(Title is from a chapter heading in Bleach; I thought it was incredibly fitting given the subject matter.)

* * *

_**paradise is nowhere**_

The tent sits quiet and drab on the very edge of the battlefield, secluded by a turn of the path and a very small stand of trees that might be natural or not. Beyond it is the battlefield, clear now of bodies and mostly clear of rubble, and before it is the rest of the camp, too quiet in its conflicted grief. They've won, they've succeeded, but in war there are no victors, really. Only survivors, and never enough of those as it is.

Kakashi makes his way up the worn track, bare earth where there was once lush grass. He doesn't hurry, meanders in the still-smoky afternoon light. He has a destination, isn't quite wandering, but at some point the destination stopped mattering. Years ago now, that was, or maybe just a moment—he can't quite bring himself to recall. Won't _allow_ himself, because somehow in the time since that last battle everything he knew in the world was turned on its head.

The tent's flap is down, and there's no sound from within. Kakashi stands in the smoky air, on the hard-packed ground, and stares at it for an endless moment. He's still a good ten yards away, could turn around now and leave and just pretend that he's walking without aim, but that thought tastes like cowardice in the back of his throat, and for all his very, very many faults Kakashi has never been a coward. Even when it would have perhaps served him better.

Three steps closer and he thinks of annoyance and anger and _why would he become a shinobi why would anyone _let_ him become a shinobi why can't he just see he's a useless idiot already and _die_._

Five steps and he remembers an argument in a shadowed forest, fury and fear and desperation and _trash trash trash can't break the rules there's _nothing else_ why can't he see. _

Six and he's too close to turn away now, even if he'd wanted to, thoughts a mess of stone and blood and tears and smiles and _no no no no I didn't mean it I changed I changed why can't that make things better don't die don't _smile at me_ how can you just give up like that._

Eight steps, and he's achingly close now, thinks of a cold stone and colder rain, a mission under the full moon and _failure failure she killed herself _I _killed her but what's another broken promise don't you see that we're useless now that you're gone even if you were always the useless one before. _

Nine steps and he lifts the flap. _The mask it's always a mask with you damn you you were everything and nothing and I just I just if you were a lie if you were _evil_ then what does that make me now that I've built my life around you you useless bastard._

He steps inside and there are no thoughts left.

There is a small cot and a smaller stool, a bucket of grimy water off to the side but nothing else. Obito sits on the stool, shoulders bowed, mismatched hands clasped between his knees. He's still dressed in his tattered battle clothes, although the fight has been over for more than a day now, and his shakujo is leaning up against the corner, splattered with blood and grime. At the intrusion he lifts his head, Rinnegan eye gone and only his Sharingan remaining, to look at Kakashi. There are lines of weariness carved just as deeply into his face as the scars, and his expression is dark.

Kakashi had never seen it dark, never before twenty-four hours ago when that orange mask cracked and fell away so artlessly.

It's a fair enough question whether he'll ever recover from that, from seeing a ghost so long and grievously dead be resurrected in the time it took a scrap of porcelain to hit the ground. And now, like this, that ghost has become a shade, a nightmarish phantasm seemingly brought back for the sole purpose of throwing Kakashi into turmoil.

The silence stretches like frozen glass or razor wire, hard and sharp and cold but with an undertone of painful heat. It's brittle too, and Kakashi's softly indrawn breath is all that's needed to break it.

"You're still here," he says, obvious but bewildering given what's happened. What could still happen.

Obito looks back down at his hands. They don't clench tight, don't fist defensively although Kakashi truly expects them to. Then Obito smiles, an awful little crooked thing, derisive and mocking and desolate and entirely self-directed. "Yes," he agrees, just louder than a murmur. He raises his hand, wrists presented as if for the chopping block, and snorts. "Not enough of a villain to get clapped in chains, not enough of a hero to be welcomed anywhere." He shrugs dismissively and lets his arms drop again, looking away.

Kakashi watches him for a long moment, hearing the words he can't, won't, will never bring himself to say. _It's not like I have anywhere else to go now, is it?_ And Kakashi understands that, maybe better than anyone else here. He understands _Obito_, as much as he wishes he didn't. Because they've both faced grief and tragedy, put on mask on top of mask in order to keep everything at a distance. Kakashi can't remember the last time he really smiled, without the intent to _use_ his smile in some way. And Obito, for all that he was forever smiling and laughing as a child, has no marks of joy on him now. There are only lines of stress and weariness, old wounds and old pains.

Their secondary masks are nothing compared to their first ones.

Silence again, a battlefield with them on opposite sides, not quite facing each other.

This time, Obito is the one to break it.

He huffs out a long, soft sigh and pushes to his feet, rising smoothly. He stands three feet from Kakashi, all the space the small tent will allow, and looks at him with a single eye that's dark with coal-black, weary grief. "I hated you," he says blandly, and Kakashi will deny that those words send a dull-dim throb of pain through his chest, because he's always loved Obito. Loved him to the point where he remade himself in his image, rewrote his very being for the boy he'd never deigned to see until it was too late.

"I hated you," Obito repeats, and reaches up, runs one scarred hand through his thick, unruly hair. "So much, Kakashi, and for so long. Right up until the day I didn't anymore. It…it would have been a world for _all_ of us." The other hand rises to join the first, fists in unruly locks so unlike the Uchiha clan's normal sleek-dark hair, and Obito bows his head, shoulders not quite shaking but very, very close. "At some point it stopped being your fault. I didn't _want_ it to be your fault. So I blamed the whole word, everything. No matter what, I didn't want—didn't want to know that Rin killed herself, and that she used _you_ to do it."

Kakashi wonders who really is to blame in this situation. Surely it's not so clear-cut—but then, nothing in the shinobi world ever is. They're all of them shades of grey. At one point, Kakashi had thought he'd adjusted to such a thing, but now he knows that to be a lie he told himself.

Grey is perhaps the cruelest color of all.

"I loved you," he returns, because there's really nothing else he can do but respond. Nothing else when they've come so far and hardly covered any ground at all. "I worshiped the way you were."

Obito smiles crookedly at that, and they both know why. He was never only what he appeared, never quite as straightforward as Kakashi always made him out to be—shades carefully concealed beneath the sharp-stark of the white and black and orange. But somehow Kakashi suspects that he's not quite as complicated as he makes himself seem, even after so many years.

It takes less than the space of time between heartbeats to understand why he's here; even less to step forward, closing the distance between them. Obito looks at him warily, two inches shorter, and it's a bit jarring when Kakashi was always the shortest on their team. But Kakashi simply lifts a hand to cup his scarred cheek, ghosts his calloused fingertips over rough ridges of tissue and then around the curve of an empty socket.

"You said you wanted to see the future through this eye. With me," he says, and it's not okay, not even vaguely, because Obito has killed so many and hurt even more, but at some point there has to be a moment where they say _stop, enough_. There's been enough blood spilled these last few days, enough lives cut short. Redemption is a small mercy in the wake of Madara's final death, easily afforded. "Do you still want to?"

Obito closes his eye, and if he doesn't lean into the touch, neither does he pull away. "I wanted to see paradise," he answers even though it's not an answer at all, but it's so very weary and sad. When he looks back at Kakashi there's only a resigned sort of hope left in his expression. That smile, when it comes again, is ever so faint, and even more illusively genuine. "I guess…this is the moment where I finally have to grow up, isn't it?"

Kakashi has no answer, no possible way of saying anything even remotely worthy of this encounter, here in a dull-drab and quiet tent on the edge of an abandoned battlefield. So he leans forward and kisses him, careful and soft and achingly sweet with an edge of long-held bitterness, and hopes it will be enough.

Hope is all any of them have, in the end.


End file.
